I don’t know if I’m just opening my eyes, or things have been getting worse. But google has become kind of scary to me. They scan your emails, know where you work, ask you how much money you make before youtube videos, ask you to review restaurants seconds after you visit them. It just started feeling creepy to me…

On that note, is there a good alternative to gmail that has a great reputation? Kind of like the duck duck go of email.

The problem with self hosted SMTP servers is that lots of mail providers (i.e. GMail) will put your emails in spam by default, because they don’t know the server, or they’ve already blacklisted it (because they don’t like the hosting provider – OVH, Leaseweb, etc).

I was trying to start using my own server and started to set up my own smtpd, configured SPF, had a proper RevDNS, but GMail was still inserting all my testing emails to spam. Eventually I’ve finished the project with my own Dovecot, series of fetchmail scripts and an existing SMTP server (from a small hosting company) and it works well (there are still problems with GMail when downloading mail with fetchmail; it doesn’t get removed from GMail, just moved to another folder).

All of these are actively better than the status quo. iOS is most definitely not open source (nor was , Chromium works well and is also OSS. Auto-updating Chrome has made browser support sooo much nicer. Dev tools. YouTube has made it so people can make some money off of their content without having to run their own ad sales, a boon for smaller video producers.

I have complaints about all of these (namely Android’s current move to be more Google-centric), but it’s possible to acknowledge these and acknowledge that they were still a good move forward. And the OSS nature means that there is almost always a way out.

EDIT: not much defense on some of the anti-competitive behavior on their part though.

Their monetization strategy hasn’t worked for years. YouTubers these days partner with 3rd party “networks” such as Machinima, Maker Studios, Wonderly, etc.

I have to admit ignorance on the monetization side of YouTube other than knowing generally that it is always losing money. But what are the “3rd party networks” and what makes them better? Or rather, what are the alternatives that they are better than?

The entire structure of the website promotes this shitty self-promoting garbage to be churned out day in and day out, with people constantly yelling “LIKE COMMENT SUBSCRIBE” over and over again.

My sense here is the exact opposite. On the user side I finally actually feel like I’m enjoying YouTube! In just the last 8-or-so months. For the first time, I am actively using YouTube to discover long-form content, rather than my previous interactions with it, which were mostly a 90-second clip someone would link me to over [insert name of other medium here], or finding long-form content linking to YouTube from other aggregation points (e.g. Confreaks). I finally subscribed to a channel for the first time last year! In that time I’ve subscribed to 6 or 7 more, and although YouTube’s own recommendations can occasionally be crap, but the few channels I follow have some new content every-other day or so, which is nice.

As a minor point on the consumer/user side, I can almost appreciate that Google is probably still losing money on YouTube, and so I am (in theory) getting a better service at a cheaper cost than would be necessary were YouTube is a standalone company. Is your concern that this leads to a monopoly because other services can’t compete?

I would agree with the statement that a monopoly is not desirable, for all of the classic reasons. Is that your issue with YouTube? I could get behind that.

YouTube has bastardized online video publishing.

Maybe part of our difference in opinion lies here.
I don’t have any memory of “online video publishing” before YouTube.

Worded differently: the only things that come to mind as “online video” pre-2006 didn’t feel like they qualified for the term “publishing”. I remember flash video sites (a mix of actual flash animation and filmed video of variable quality), a few sites that were aggregating .avi or .mpeg files of non-flash content, and of course pirating movies overnight on 56k internet. Avast.

Now that I’m typing this, I realize I have used two “TV on Internet” services. I spent a few year streaming c-span.org, and also tried that website the TV broadcasters (iirc) set up to host their videos together and compete with YouTube and/or Piracy. Was that Hulu? I remember using that a few times when someone had linked me.

But back to my point: I have many, many fond memories of the older, less-centralized internet, its culture, how its culture inter-operated with the broader culture and so forth. Video is not especially present in any of those memories, unless you count the Numa Numa video. If YouTube bastardized anything, I either don’t know what it was, or I don’t miss it.

What about pre-YouTube online video publishing do I not know about, and what advantages did it have?

I don’t understand why people give Google so much leeway when it comes to being a crappy company.

It is also strange that so many good hackers, even prominent FLOSS hackers want to work for them. Building a big spy machine is apparently ok when you have cool perks and a big salary. Whatever happened to ethics?

I think the effects of this are being overblown. I’m perfectly happy running uBlock Origin everywhere, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Heck, I don’t even use Chrome as my primary browser on any device anymore. There’s multiple high quality browsers available on most platforms, so if you’re unhappy with one browser you can just switch to another that matches your requirements.

The existence of alternatives does nothing for publishers if people don’t use them. Which empirically they don’t. The Chrome integration means if your ads don’t get the blessing of the Coalition for Better Ads then your ad revenue just got cut in half.

Just to piggy back on this comment - my company (which manufactures a product) only advertises through Facebook and Google. We have partnerships with other businesses and stuff, but I don’t think that falls into the realm of “buying ad space”.